English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing.
This tenth of ten Live from London concerts was in fact a recorded live performance from California. It was no less enjoyable for that, and it was also uplifting to learn that this wasn’t in fact the ‘last’ LfL event that we will be able to enjoy, courtesy of VOCES8 and their fellow vocal ensembles (more below …).
Ever since Wigmore Hall announced their superb series of autumn concerts, all streamed live and available free of charge, I’d been looking forward to this song recital by Ian Bostridge and Imogen Cooper.
The Sixteen continues its exploration of Henry Purcell’s Welcome Songs for Charles II. As with Robert King’s pioneering Purcell series begun over thirty years ago for Hyperion, Harry Christophers is recording two Welcome Songs per disc.
Although Stile Antico’s programme article for their Live from London recital introduced their selection from the many treasures of the English Renaissance in the context of the theological debates and upheavals of the Tudor and Elizabethan years, their performance was more evocative of private chamber music than of public liturgy.
In February this year, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho made a highly lauded debut recital at Wigmore Hall - a concert which both celebrated Opera Rara’s 50th anniversary and honoured the career of the Italian soprano Rosina Storchio (1872-1945), the star of verismo who created the title roles in Leoncavallo’s La bohème and Zazà, Mascagni’s Lodoletta and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
Evidently, face masks don’t stifle appreciative “Bravo!”s. And, reducing audience numbers doesn’t lower the volume of such acclamations. For, the audience at Wigmore Hall gave soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn and pianist Simon Lepper a greatly deserved warm reception and hearty response following this lunchtime recital of late-Romantic song.
Collapsology. Or, perhaps we should use the French word ‘Collapsologie’ because this is a transdisciplinary idea pretty much advocated by a series of French theorists - and apparently, mostly French theorists. It in essence focuses on the imminent collapse of modern society and all its layers - a series of escalating crises on a global scale: environmental, economic, geopolitical, governmental; the list is extensive.
For this week’s Live from London vocal recital we moved from the home of VOCES8, St Anne and St Agnes in the City of London, to Kings Place, where The Sixteen - who have been associate artists at the venue for some time - presented a programme of music and words bound together by the theme of ‘reflection’.
'Such is your divine Disposation that both you excellently understand, and royally entertaine the Exercise of Musicke.’
Amongst an avalanche of new Mahler recordings appearing at the moment (Das Lied von der Erde seems to be the most favoured, with three) this 1991 Mahler Second from the 2nd Kassel MahlerFest is one of the more interesting releases.
‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven … that old serpent … Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’
If there is one myth, it seems believed by some people today, that probably needs shattering it is that post-war recordings or performances of Wagner operas were always of exceptional quality. This 1949 Hamburg Tristan und Isolde is one of those recordings - though quite who is to blame for its many problems takes quite some unearthing.
There was never any doubt that the fifth of the twelve Met Stars Live in Concert broadcasts was going to be a palpably intense and vivid event, as well as a musically stunning and theatrically enervating experience.
‘Love’ was the theme for this Live from London performance by Apollo5. Given the complexity and diversity of that human emotion, and Apollo5’s reputation for versatility and diverse repertoire, ranging from Renaissance choral music to jazz, from contemporary classical works to popular song, it was no surprise that their programme spanned 500 years and several musical styles.
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields have titled their autumn series of eight concerts - which are taking place at 5pm and 7.30pm on two Saturdays each month at their home venue in Trafalgar Square, and being filmed for streaming the following Thursday - ‘re:connect’.
The London Symphony Orchestra opened their Autumn 2020 season with a homage to Oliver Knussen, who died at the age of 66 in July 2018. The programme traced a national musical lineage through the twentieth century, from Britten to Knussen, on to Mark-Anthony Turnage, and entwining the LSO and Rattle too.
With the Live from London digital vocal festival entering the second half of the series, the festival’s host, VOCES8, returned to their home at St Annes and St Agnes in the City of London to present a sequence of ‘Choral Dances’ - vocal music inspired by dance, embracing diverse genres from the Renaissance madrigal to swing jazz.
Just a few unison string wriggles from the opening of Mozart’s overture to Le nozze di Figaro are enough to make any opera-lover perch on the edge of their seat, in excited anticipation of the drama in music to come, so there could be no other curtain-raiser for this Gala Concert at the Royal Opera House, the latest instalment from ‘their House’ to ‘our houses’.
"Before the ending of the day, creator of all things, we pray that, with your accustomed mercy, you may watch over us."
Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress is not, in many ways, a progressive opera; it doesn’t seek to radicalise, or even transform, opera and yet it is indisputably one of the great twentieth-century operas.
It may look back to Handel or Mozart, especially in its slightly archaic use of recitative that is woven throughout the opera, but it remains a very distinctively Stravinskian work: that dark, richly chromatic string quartet which opens the prelude to the churchyard scene, and how it atmospherically sounds so sepulchral and sparse, could in many ways have only come from the pen of Stravinsky.
But this is opera as morality play too. Inspired by Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, a series of paintings and engravings from 1733-5, it’s a parable of a young rogue in search of wealth and love but ultimately led astray by the Devil and into insanity. Stravinsky was probably wise to retain the setting of his opera to London because atmospherically it is just so right. Hogarth was particularly adept at objectifying madness - but Stravinsky had a whole pool of artistic influences to draw on extending back to Bosch, and looking beyond Hogarth to the work of Géricault, Goya, Fleury and Richard Dadd, who spent much of his life incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals - and even to the novels of Dickens. But Stravinsky is nothing if not a touch indebted to allusion because his Rake’s Progress is also a much wider allegory on the decline of western culture. It’s perhaps for this very reason that he suggested that this opera is difficult to stage, but musically rather simpler to perform. This was probably why the London Philharmonic’s concert performance, given in a subtle semi-staging, worked as well as it did.
Stravinsky’s music, of course, is just half of what makes this such as exceptional work; the libretto, by W H Auden and Chester Kallman, is also one of the great operatic texts. It’s not a coincidence that the greatest librettos come from the pens of writers who happened to be great poets - John Dryden, Hugo von Hoffmanstahl - and Auden. Not all of Auden’s text is metrically, or even rhythmically, musical to be honest and it probably takes a conductor like Vladimir Jurowski - whose clear beat and ability to unpeel the layers of chromaticism in the music - make this even more apparent. At times the libretto sounds a little old fashioned; but it also soars to a level of inspiration and poetry that recalls TS Eliot in lines like: ‘Although I do not hope to turn again/Although I do not hope/Although I do not hope to turn’. Lines rhyme sparingly - but this was always an Auden characteristic.
The LPO’s performance of Stravinsky’s opera was simply magisterial. From the opening fanfare on trumpets and horns, to a quartet of oboe, cor anglais and two bassoons Jurowski set the tone of what was to largely become hallmarks of this performance: elegant phrasing, with woodwind and brass playing in stanzas, precisely as a great opera orchestra should, and individual instrumental solos (notable ones on horn, trumpet and cello) which spoke so wonderfully and poetically with the inflexions of a voice. Even something as simple as the pattering of semiquavers on strings were given the benefit of a scale that went way beyond the mere orchestral. A really notable feature of the performance was the superb harpsichord playing - it shifts between major and minor keys, but the effect was quite magical. If it was staged in such a way as to look like a grave, musically the playing conjured up a scent of creeping oppressiveness, but also of skeletal fragility and horror. The Bedlam scenes were brooding and powerful - unleashed by Jurowski with chords that were given the broadest of brush strokes culminating in a ‘Mourning Chorus’ that was steeped in graphically resonant playing from bassoons, brass and timpani.
Vocally, there was much to cherish in this performance. Certainly the most interesting piece of casting was Andrew Watts (replacing Patricia Bardon) as Baba the Turk. If this changed the concept of the bearded lady into something more homoflexible, even transgendered, it was a welcome one. Watts was the right side of camp - but it was also entirely in keeping with how this vision of London, a more modern, perhaps less Hogarthian one, was being projected too. Vocally, it was a terrific performance - drenched in risky humour, but the trills, and runs, were given to resemble a nagging ‘wife’ wonderfully. He launched into his aria ‘Scorned! Abused!’ with unusual venom - it was both powerful and dramatic - the fury unrepressed, resorting to tearing up what looked like a music score and throwing it around in anger. Tom simply covered his head with a tablecloth.
There was also much to enjoy in Sophia Burgos’s Anne Trulove. The voice is a rich one, deeply expressive, but entirely capable of meeting the demands of Stravinsky’s writing for the soprano part. Her Cabaletta at the end of Act I was truly memorable - a declaration of love for Tom that was shining in its vocal brilliance and elegant phrasing and a ringing high C to end. If there is a criticism, it’s that she sometimes felt just a little too fragile and you didn’t always feel her love for Rakewell was quite worth pursuing. Her Act III Lullaby sounded just a touch weary too. Marie McLaughlin’s Mother Goose - if vocally having little to do - proved something of a scene stealer. The brothel scene was a tour de force of dramatic intervention, as Mother Goose evocatively flirted with the orchestra and the choir (the superb London Voices), as well as Jurowski, and the whole scene was brimming with humour.
A great Rake’s Progress, however, turns on the casting of Tom Rakewell and his Shadow, Nick. And this is what we got here. The apotheosis and climax of this interaction happens in the graveyard - it is a resolution that is haunted by menace, and one where Tom comes to recognise the despair and hopelessness which will be his lot, and his Shadow refuses to release him from his torment. Fate comes to rest on a card game - on chance - though it is one that is to ultimately precipitate Rakewell’s descent into madness. Toby Spence (as Tom) and Matthew Rose (as Nick Shadow - and, in a clever piece of dual casting, as the Keeper of the Madhouse) were superb. Spence brought vulnerability and gullibility to his Rakewell; Rose, a sinister flourish of menace. If you feel at the beginning of the opera there is something slightly reminiscent in this relationship to that of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Leporello it has become transformative by Act III. The achievement of Spence and Rose was that they brought such wonderful symbiosis to their parts.
Stravinsky had always been pragmatic about the problems of staging this opera and in this concert performance much relied on creating a sense of atmosphere rather than attempting to place it in the context of the opera’s drama. Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting was in some ways quite extravagant - it could be both impressively wide, taking in whole swathes of the stage - or it could do quite the opposite focusing on individual singers, or even individual orchestral players. Off stage voices were just as important as those on stage - Nick Shadow first emerged from the stalls. In every sense this was a performance which had a deep sense of how sound should be used to create operatic effect and emotion.
This was a memorable performance - and with microphones present was recorded.
Marc Bridle
Igor Stravinsky: The Rake’s Progress
Tom Rakewell - Toby Spence, Anne Trulove - Sophia Burgos, Nick Shadow - Matthew Rose, Baba the Turk - Andrew Watts, Father Trulove - Clive Bayley, Sellem - Kim Begley, Mother Goose - Marie McLaughlin, Keeper of the Madhouse - Matthew Rose, Whores, roaring boys, servants, citizens, madmen - London Voices; Conductor - Vladimir Jurowski, Lighting Designer - Malcolm Rippeth, Costume - Kitty Callister, London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Royal Festival Hall, London; 3rd November 2018.